Fisheries Committee on March 23rd, 2023

[Danny Arsenault]

Yes. You are certainly correct.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

Mr. LeClair and Mr. Arsenault, what will the face of the east coast fishery be if governments do not enact policy that effectively manages the east coast seal population?

Begin, Kenny, if you want, and then we can finish with Danny.

[Kenneth LeClair, Vice President, Prince Edward Island Fishermen's Association]

I like to compare it to the issues of farming. On land, if people drive by a country road and see farmland full of vegetables and the next day they drive by and its full of seals eating all the vegetables, the farmers would be yelling at their MPs to take action to find a solution for how to get rid of all the seals.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

On that note, I will let Danny finish up.

What will the east coast...? As you pointed out, it is almost totally dependent on lobster and crab, which are mono-fisheries, which is dangerous.

[Danny Arsenault]

All you have to do is look back to when the moratorium was put on the cod. You saw what happened to the coastal communities in Newfoundland. The exact same thing is going to happen here, because this is what we depend on. These are the last stocks left. There's nothing left besides that.

The Atlantic way of life of coastal communities is going to be gone.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Morrissey. Your time has gone a few seconds over.

We will now go to Monsieur Champoux for six minutes or less, please.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I also thank the witnesses for their remarks, which were very informative, very interesting.

My first question is for Mr. Hardy.

You talked about weir fishing. My colleague who usually sits on this committee knows a lot about it. She is from Île‑aux‑Coudres, as you may know. During last year's fishing season, she took the file very much to heart when there were problems with licensing.

You ended your remarks by saying that this is a time for action and not endless debate. Do you feel that this is the Department of Fisheries and Oceans' current position? Do you have the impression that the department is ready to act, or that it is waiting for something, I don't know what, before taking real action?

[Robert Hardy]

I can go only by what I see locally. I cannot say what the mindset in Ottawa is.

Locally, among the scientists who have been involved with the fishing industry and in particular with seals, the mindset is that seals—I can give you press release after press release—have no impact on any fishery in Newfoundland or, I would say, in Atlantic Canada.

There are exceptions, as Mr. Vascotto indicated. There is Doug Swain from DFO, who came out in 2019, I believe it was, and said that the cod fishery would be destroyed by the grey seal, even without commercial fishing. There's a similar report with yellowtail flounder, I believe.

This week in Newfoundland, we have had issues with ice. I watched the evening news last night and I saw a DFO scientist on television, stating that marine mammals were in trouble and that pup seals were dying because of poor ice.

This is simply not factual. If you have millions of pups and you see 10 around Newfoundland that are dead, that's an anomaly. That's not bad ice.

Sir, I tell you I have not seen a change in mindset. I could give you details, privately, of my own conversations with DFO scientists. They are in no way accepting that seals are a problem in our fishery.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Thank you.

I will now turn to Mr. Vascotto, if I may.

I wanted to talk to you about the ongoing moratorium. Earlier, we heard Mr. Arsenault's remarks, which I think conveyed his personal situation. Many fishers in Quebec and several eastern coastal communities in the Maritimes are in the same situation. This is quite common in Quebec, and the moratorium is preventing many of those fishers from earning a living.

Is the moratorium still justified?

If no real solution is implemented for pinnipeds, what impact will they have on biomass, in the short and medium term? How do you see it? Has the alarm not rung loudly enough?

[Dr. Kris Vascotto]

That is an excellent question, because it forces us to stand, look forward and say that if we have a seal herd that exists at this current population level and we're not going to take any proactive action to try to dial it down, then I don't think it's reasonable for us to expect many of these fish stocks to rebuild to these levels that we might have seen in 1960, 1970 or the early 1980s. It's just downright impossible.

At that point, if there's going to be an acceptance that we are, as a government or as a country, not going to reduce these herds in any way, shape or form, then we should not be calling these stocks depleted. They are as big as they're going to get with so many of them in the ecosystem. It affects the dependent pinniped populations, which are pushing down on them like a thumb.

I hope that answered your question. Thank you.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Yes, thank you.

I will now turn to Mr. Arsenault.

I think you ran out of time earlier to conclude your remarks. There's about a minute and half left in my turn. I'd like you to take that time to tell us about the situation you experienced over the last 50 years, to tell us just how desperate the current situation has become for fishers, and tell us how we can organize quickly, if that's still possible, to turn the tide.

[Danny Arsenault]

What I was getting at was that when, like you said, the moratorium was in place, at first everyone thought that it was going to work. When we saw that it didn't work, and we were trying to figure out what it was, DFO couldn't really come up with an answer. The fishermen saw what we were seeing and the way things were going, and we realized it.

What DFO missed, I think, was that at the time, there was a certain quota set on the fish. Every time they fished, they would do a survey and cut the quota, which was understandable. As they kept cutting that quota, it was cut to the fishermen. They never realized that there were two groups fishing. The fishermen were taken off the water, yet the stock went down. What was wrong? Then they came up to stall more, as I mentioned a while ago, about the large cod. They said that the seals are not eating the large cod. Well, we proved that to them.

One guy mentioned Doug Swain a while ago, a head scientist in Moncton. He is the one who sat down with us. He said “Hey, you guys hit the nail on the head here.” He was working to try to do something to help us.

I think if we don't do it, it's too late if we don't get it done now.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Champoux.

We'll now go to Ms. Barron for six minutes or less, please.

[Lisa Marie Barron, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the witnesses who are here.

First I want to thank Mr. Hardy for sending the videos that he did. I enjoyed them while eating my dinner the other night. They were very informative, so thank you for that.

I want to make this clear, and I know members around the table have heard me say this a million times. I just want to reiterate that I am very much in support of a sustainable seal harvest. In my family, we were talking about the cod moratorium. We moved from the east coast to the west after the cod moratorium, because of the impacts on the community there.

I recently visited Nunavut and was speaking with indigenous people in the fishing communities there about the importance of a sustainable seal harvest. We know there's no denying that we need to be taking timely action around this.

I want to see if I can play a bit of a devil's advocate here, Mr. Hardy. I think it's always good when we call out things that we're seeing and get other thoughts on it.

In the media today I was reading that “seal diets vary according to seasons, ages, sexes, and among areas and years.” In context, this was speaking to the complexity of the issue of seal predation and its impacts on cod. I'm wondering if you can speak to that quote and provide some of your thoughts.

[Robert Hardy]

Yes, I certainly agree with that statement. Seals will eat anything in the ocean. Depending on seasonality, meaning when certain species are available, they will consume that species. Depending on the numbers of seals, the impact on the particular population can be significant.

If I refer to DFO science and the stomach sampling program they had in Newfoundland and Labrador for at least 25 years, they used the same sealers in the same communities at the same time of year. What makes that interesting is that the stomach sampling was done in the winter months, from inshore vessels. They went up the northeast coast to Newfoundland and places like La Scie, and they collected stomach samples. When they looked in those seal stomachs—harp seals predominately—they didn't find a lot of caplan or cod. Now, why didn't they find a lot of caplan or cod during that time of the year? They simply weren't there.

I will use an analogy that was used with the Atlantic seal science task team, which Mr. Vascotto was part of. If we were to sample a black bear stomach in the spring of the year, after they came out of hibernation, would we find blueberries in their stomach? No. The same is true for the large part of the seal stomach samples that have been done in Newfoundland—there was little caplan or cod.

[Lisa Marie Barron, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Thank you for that information.

Based on that, then, I'm trying to understand what the best way forward is. If we know there are seasonal differences, age differences and regional differences, how would this look, moving forward, for us to look at implementing a sustainable seal harvest on the east coast, specifically?

[Robert Hardy]

A year or so ago I spoke to some of you parliamentarians with another group. We talked to 50 MPs across Canada, and practically all were 100% supportive of our message, but we have an existing quota, and our quota is, I don't know, 460,000 animals, for harps. This year, the ask is for 25,000 animals— that's the ask, so we have a long way to go before we can go to DFO and ask for more quota. We need to be able to utilize the resource in a sustainable manner, as you're suggesting, and we need to be able to do some good, not only for everyone in Atlantic Canada and western Canada, B.C., but for other people in the world. There is a shortage of food, and seal is very nutritious.

[Lisa Marie Barron, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Hardy. I have time for only one last question. Could you share a bit more about how you feel that the observations of fishers out on the water could be better utilized to provide the information that we need and to complement the information that you were talking about that was being received by DFO, which was lacking? Can you expand on that?

[Robert Hardy]

Yes. You have two fishers here today, Mr. LeClair and the other gentleman there, from P.E.I. Any science would value their input. These gentlemen have a lifetime of experience. They're on the water every day, so what they see is important. I think they have been ignored for far too long.

Just to give you an example, there was a caplan meeting yesterday in Gander. I spoke to a fisherman, and he said that meetings were not like they used to be. You can't have a discussion. You're not allowed to go outside the bounds of the particular meeting.

We have to get beyond that. In Newfoundland, time and time again, whether it's caplan, herring, crab or any other species, when fishermen bring up seals, there's a threat to close down the meeting.

Thank you again.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Ms. Barron.

We'll now go to Mr. Perkins for five minutes or less, please.

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, witnesses.

Mr. Hardy, I understand that the Fisheries Resource Conservation Council was established in 1993. It put out a report in 1994, calling for a significant reduction in all seal populations. In response to that report and more work by DFO, in 1995, then DFO minister Brian Tobin—whom some of you may remember—in conclusion, said there was only one major player still fishing cod. He said, “His first name is harp and his second name is seal.”

Then again, in 1999, I believe, the FRCC recommended that DFO reduce seal herds by up to 50%, and those herds, of course, were a lot smaller than they are today. Believe it or not, in 2002 there was a seal forum in Newfoundland. Does that sound familiar? There was a lot of discussion about this issue. The list of studies goes on and on. The 2005 northern cod FOPO study said that even if cod represented only 1% of the seal's diet, “this would...amount to 60,000 tonnes of cod [disappearing] per year”.

You referred earlier to Dr. Swain and that report in 2019. He said, “At the current abundance of grey seals in this ecosystem, recovery of this cod population does not appear to be possible, and its extinction is highly probable.”

We had a seal summit again. It just happened again in the fall in Newfoundland, and I had the honour to be there. There was a big revelation before that. Minister Murray said that “seals eat fish”—apparently that was new. The big headline coming out of that report was that the minister pledged that we need to do more research on seals to figure out what's going on with the fishery.

I'll ask you this, Mr. Hardy. Do we need to do more science to find out what's happening to our fishery, because of seals?

[Robert Hardy]

There is a two-letter answer: no.

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

How about you, Mr. Vascotto? Do you believe the same thing?

[Dr. Kris Vascotto]

I would say we are in a position where there is a lot of information out there. Whether it's been interpreted or collected and balanced is another question. I would say that we have enough in hand to take some significant actions on the seal populations.

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Thank you.

Again, Mr. Vascotto, I'm not sure if it's still up, but there was a PowerPoint slide on the DFO website that showed some seal summit sample results. In their winter sampling of grey seals, they found that 47% of the stomach content was Atlantic mackerel; in the summer, the content, surprisingly, was almost 60% Atlantic herring and Atlantic cod. This is to Mr. Hardy's point about when you hunt them.

At that level, is that not a level far greater than the spawning biomass that exists for those stocks? Is that not the reason they are declining?